Summary
In this chapter, you learned how to generate intermediate code. Generating intermediate code is the first vital step in synthesizing the instructions that will eventually allow a machine to run the user's program. The skills you learned in this chapter build on the skills that are used in semantic analysis, such as how to add semantic attributes to the syntax tree nodes, and how to traverse syntax tree nodes in complex ways as needed.
One of the important features of this chapter was an example intermediate code instruction set that we used for the Jzero language. Since the code is abstract, you can add new instructions to this instruction set as needed for your language. Building lists of these instructions was easy using Unicon's list data type, and still fairly straightforward using Java's ArrayList type.
The chapter showed you how to generate code for straight-line expressions such as arithmetic calculations. Far more effort in this chapter went into...
